


Introduction to the Skaianet Employee Handbook, ver. 3.19 (by Mobius Trip)

by liquidCitrus



Series: Skaianet's Lore [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, Skaianet Laboratories, Speculative, sburb patch notes universe, soft sci fi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-14
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-23 17:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 5,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquidCitrus/pseuds/liquidCitrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Funny that the outfit I so loved, the post that I claimed out of my conscience demanding I <i>do something</i> about the terror of unrestricted warfare, ultimately became my downfall, pitting me against the young woman that I loved...</p><p>Skaianet Laboratories speculative fic, obviously AU out the wazoo, completely co-opting the characters of Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido. Vaguely based on <a href="http://www.mspaforums.com/showthread.php?41228">Sburb Patch Notes</a>; however, is a stand-alone work.</p><p>I'll admit the pacing/editing is a bit spotty, I start actually paying attention to it about chapter 3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Forever

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/4580) by Michael "Guy" Bowman. 



> Okay, just going to warn you again that it's very AU. But I promise you they do end up in the same place, at the end. It's just the journey that is far different.
> 
> I've got a lot of theories about Skaianet Laboratories. Only some of them are used here, and not all of them will fit together to produce the whole. Other pieces are in my other Skaianet 'fics, if you care for such things. Or Sburb Patch Notes, if you prefer their version of events.
> 
> Perhaps I'll write more of my idea of Reality Programming one day.
> 
> Note: There is a reason for the Graphic Depictions of Violence warning. Characters _do_ get seriously hurt or killed in the Sburb Patch Notes universe, and it _is_ anatomically realistic rather than video-gamey. It's not deliberately or excessively gory, but it happens, because I tend towards realism significantly more than Andrew does. This is intentional.

Our world is - well, it wouldn't be quite right to say it is a simulation, but. Reality has API hooks. I'm not entirely sure how I learned this, except that the first methods came to me in a dream of bread-boards and vacuum tubes, and I - _we_ , really - worked from there. (Although the plural did not come until later.) The Prime Circuit, I called it. I was in college then, and I confess I was rash at the time, for I tried to explore its functions. It was only after several narrow escapes and at least one serious injury (I accidentally deleted half of my foot and then neglected to stem the blood-flow) that I realized I could not do this work alone. I recruited someone else to share in the secret.

My newfound compatriot in this endeavor was Ms. Kaleido. She wore arm-length white gloves, a habit I thought quaint - a throwback to an earlier time. Her mind was sharp, worldly in a way that mine was not; she had recently come back from an archaeological dig in the Pacific, of some civilization that put especial importance on frogs and mathematically interesting spirographs. Perhaps they worshipped them, she said. She professed to reading Nietzche, though, and her tongue was just as sharp as her thoughts. Yet she appealed to me, complemented my mind in a way that I was only half-conscious of. She said that the ideas that she brought me came to her in recurring dreams, an assertion I did not dispute. My dreams recurred as well, and often had relevant ideas - was this not a normal occurrence?

She often accused me of being blind, of being naive, of living in my own little bubble. In hindsight, I was cognizant only of the great task before me, the idea she had of turning the symbology on the temple of the Frogs - the Frog Temple, we called it - into the reality-changing code it described. I in turn thought her excessively acerbic, too absorbed in the forest to even so much as look at the trees. We nearly came to blows, sometimes. I was always the one who made up. Ultimately, thought, we were friends, sharing the knowledge that the code was the important thing. We started capitalizing it. It was important enough to deserve that, I thought.

I turned out some proof-of-concept projects to get myself some investors. The Sylladex was an immediate hit, and if the philosophers argued amongst themselves about the presence of such a thing that could warp the confines of reality, I heard nothing of it. The scientists asked me how I had done it; I told them, and chemical supply stores became obsolete overnight. I dropped out that year, used the proceeds from the continuing popularity of the Sylladex to buy myself a computer smaller and faster than the one I had worked with at school, and kept working on the Code, with my partner's continued work on the mysterious language of the frogs to guide me.

I had no business talent; I cared only for the symbols slowly taking shape in front of me. As I coded, the world continued turning - the year I polished ~ATH and released it for research use, Hadron Kaleido became the co-founder and CEO of Skaianet Laboratories. The name was my idea; the execution (the corporate intrigue, the hiring, the office we moved into) was completely hers. I appeared at dinners, and tapped away at my PDA as she tried to get people to make small talk with me. I read speeches from a teleprompter and got off the stage as soon as I was physically able. I gained a reputation for being shy and mysterious. The former I understood, the latter I cared absolutely nothing about.

The game took shape, became more than simply the vague idea of someone with an interest in the occult. It continued to amaze me that the symbols continued to decode, into good workable code - true, it had some errors, and a few pieces were missing altogether, but the Code fitted together into a whole with a completeness and a majesty that astonished me every time I took a step back. It should not have made sense, and yet it did.

It only occurred to me much, much later that the code sent from on high was also my work... and by then, I had already lost my world and my friend along with it.


	2. Dawn of Man

I remember when we first Entered. Even after all these years, I still remember the feeling of satisfaction as the last subroutine was completed, the last compiler error chased away, and we had the Game, one that followed the guidelines that the Frog Temple had set us so long ago. We burnt the Game to disks, two each - a client and a server. We connected, and we destroyed our own world in the process - though it was always doomed, if you believe the Sprites. You have probably already played the Game too; you know how it goes.

The frogs; I had to resuscitate them. I was upon a Land of caverns and what could've been mudflats if they had any water whatsoever - but the planet was dry. I learnt that it had been like this for hundreds of years, that the frogs and tadpoles hibernated below the surface, dehydrated, awaiting the rain that would reawaken them. This was a simple enough hero's quest, find the water and awaken and clone the frogs - but occasionally I stepped wrong, and a piece of the land below me crumbled away and I was left scrambling upon an outcrop of rock above thousands of miles of nothing.

I carried a parachute, for such occasions, and a sword that I used to smite (for that was a very nice word) the enemies I came across, and a guitar that had been alchemized until it possessed space-warping properties. (It was only later that I learned that the guitar was a way for me to focus powers given innately, rather than something inherent in the instrument.) It was thus I played the game.

And I dreamt of a great golden tower, and a sphere with clouds on its surface, clouds that reflected what was and would happen. I had been dreaming it for all my life, without comprehension. It was only when our dear little pigeon AIs told me that it was part of the Game that I understood: I had created this place because I had dreamt of it, and yet if I had not created it I would never have dreamt of such a thing.

So I frolicked upon the planet and its moon, both in gold, and learnt of its world: the Queen's benevolent but firm hand upon her realm; the civilians with their childlike trust in us Players, and in Skaia; the terrible planet of Derse; the Battlefield's increasing casualties. Even now, knowing that they are only constructs, I still remember their names and faces - Aila, the baker's boy, who loved my juggling; Sonen who had shifts in the guardhouse beneath my tower and would play a set of pipes as I sang folk songs; Worn, who was the Queen's favored messenger and challenged everyone she met to races.

My friend, though, she dreamt of a violet world wreathed in shadow, of asteroids floating in inky blackness, of terrors beyond human comprehension. I suppose it was a good thing that she was not human, then. When I touched her flesh, that first time, when I was dying and she was so rushed that she took no precautions when transporting me to my Quest Bed, her flesh was not yielding, like a human's, but firm, almost insectoid in quality. She had an exoskeleton.

The world upon which I awoke was Skaia, checkered white and black landscape below, clouds and sky and visions above. It was by the visions that I recognized where I was. I descended upon the battle, observed it for a moment, floating - the Knight, not yet ready to bloody his sword. I saw the Prospitians and Dersites moving against each other, formations, clashing against each other with what should've been adorable little shortswords. The blood dripped across the ground, flowing into rivers of what might've been liquid light, so bright they shone - and the entire battlefield was thus highlighted in lurid pinkish-red. It was a sight that repulsed me, but I swore to return soon, to stop the war.

Instead of befriending my Denizen, similarly, I followed the earlier black-and-white answers that my sprite had given me. With my powers I killed Atlas as he slept, thus restoring my world without learning of my purpose. It is Skaianet that finally told me I should have availed myself of that opportunity to learn of shades of gray. (My Genesis Frog was fine, but perhaps it was destined that way.) It took me more death to learn the lesson all of Skaia had tried to teach me.


	3. Beta Version

I sang airs in the field hospital on the Battlefield, stepping lightly over puddles of too-red blood, taking requests for the folk songs that the dying wished for. I had come again; and in waiting for the appointment with the King on the battlefield, I was waiting in what used to be the antechamber of a fortress. It was now filled to capacity with bustling medics and the cries of wounded soldiers. A pawn, a secretary, opened a door at the other end and beckoned for me. I entered the throne-room.

The White King was massive - a huge beast, all claws and tentacles and teeth and eyes. Yang to the Queen's yin, Hadron said of the two great royals. Offensive king to defensive queen. And the King had a _presence_ , all thirty-five feet of him. I was reminded that he was mortal, that he would be defeated eventually and that I would have to avenge his death against his superior. This thought was accompanied by a brief drum-roll fear, and I put it away for the moment.

I was there to take the final step, two weeks and a day and six hours into my session. I had signed up with the Queen and became an official Agent of the planet of Prospit. I would take on the ruling duties, and in exchange, I swore fealty to the king and queen (another touch of medieval fantasy that I insisted on). The King too confirmed this agreement and appointment, and left me to report to either Royal after I had made all necessary preparations.

As I left, I saw a familiar face. Worn, the messenger. She thrust a parcel into my hands, feet still stamping like a horse's, pawing at the ground. "This is for you, her Highness said," she piped up in a high, clear voice. I accepted the parcel, unwrapped it. A Prospitian uniform. They wanted me to be open about this, then. That solved one problem, posed another. What would I say to Hadron? Almost reflexively I tried to sense her, to probe where she was so I knew where to go.

She wasn't there. She wasn't anywhere. She was slipping away from my sense of Space as if she were dreaming, and could not awaken. This turned out to be true. She was not in the Land of Jungles and Clockwork, either. This was also true. Worn had vanished before I could call her, and I was left, holding a uniform of pastels, silver, and gold, staring at the clouds, willing them to tell me the answer.

A camera whirred somewhere nearby. On instinct, I whirled around, but the camera of one of the Prospitian propaganda outfits had already captured me - a moment silhouetted against the sky, feeling the chains of Prospit, my position, my Knightly duty, dragging at my feet - but another thing caught my eye even as the cameraman scurried away. The cloud above the camera showed Hadron on Derse. She was carrying another uniform, that of the Dersian agents, and her face, though older than her years with fatigue, had some vague happiness to it. As if she _enjoyed_ carrying the uniform.

Foreboding seized me. I flew away, back to my planet.

I took a peek into the code. I liked the symbol of Light, for it was a sun, and the Space god-tier outfit was black as ink, totally unfitting for my new role. I alchemized with the Prospitian uniform, giving it my own touches, not just the regal gold of the Towers but also the clear blue of the Skaian sky. It is amusing to me that this was the only warning of the Game that I was straying off the Path: I did not fit into any of their uniforms.

Funny that the outfit I so loved, the post that I claimed out of my conscience demanding I _do something_ about the terror of unrestricted warfare, ultimately became my downfall, pitting me against the young woman that I loved...

But enough of that, now. First, I had a job to do.


	4. No Release

Night, and the "skaiaset" was lovely from my perch on the Land of Caverns and Frogs. My mind, though, tumbled through scenario after scenario uneasily. I slept restlessly after my Ascension, finding my new dreams populated with dead doomed versions of myself. It was difficult for me to bear them; I thought the dream-bubbles nightmares compared to the clouds of Skaia - but they represented what did not come to pass, as opposed to Skaia's clouds showing what truly happened. Regardless, new duties - and a large amount of caffeine - sustained me.

The pawns, may Skaia bless their innocent souls, knew nothing of my inner turmoil. As an Agent, I should properly have taken on an administrative role. My Queen and I conferred, though, and agreed that I was far better-placed on the Battlefield itself, as their champion. I fought alongside the White Army, and brought my little squads many victories. They had new songs about me; they were seeing legend come to life, I was more than they had ever hoped for.

In contrast, the Black Armies learned to fear me. I was the human, the one with no carapace and powers granted by Skaia (i.e. the game) itself. They once worshipped the Dreamers for precipitating the Reckoning, the destruction of Skaia. Now their scouts carried tales of my alliance - though they spoke of it as my betrayal. And thus, I may well have forced my co-player's hand: they offered her the choice I had taken.

I regret to say that she took it.

Perhaps it was my fault. Perhaps I hadn't pressed her hard enough; perhaps if I had held on to her more tightly, none of this would have happened. But that's far in the past now, and attempting to guide my earlier self along a different line would lead to my death in another timeline. Perhaps this is why I am writing now; that someone else might learn the easy way what I learned the hard way.

This isn't why I founded Skaianet, though. I founded Skaianet because nobody else had, because someone needed to be responsible for the infinity of children and universes that the game made. Who would pay for hosting? Who would expand and debug the Code? And, most pressingly, what would defend the Game itself against the intrusions of those who wished to bring it destruction? If you are reading this document, you know the answer, now. Skaianet does this for you, for us, for the game, for the universes we guide it to create. There is danger, and there is gratitude, and there is more power than anyone has ever held before.

The Code is the key. But I digress.

I fought alongside my Pawns, and I usually won. But there were rumors on the battlefield, rumors that began to substantiate themselves in the form of our scouts, dead, with the emblem of Derse carved into their flesh, and it was that day that I realized the cloud was indeed prescience of a useful form: Hadron had joined the other side. She fought for Derse. When the royals forced her hand, they also forced mine. I would have to find her. I would have to fight her.

But I was good at it, after extensive practice on the Battlefield, and she didn't have time to earn that same kind of expertise.

Or did she?


	5. Fly

But it was not all victories, either. Thereafter, I would occasionally encounter her. Space comes with its own sense - not prescience, just sense, I was not a Seer - and as such I only ever encountered Hadron-the-agent when I wasn't looking. I would then teleport the soldiers away, to protect them - and Hadron and I fought. I spun space, tried several times to kill some of her alts from other timelines. (Air with sufficient density can do anything.) She continued with her timeclones, without hint of emotion, fired at me while I swung the sword.

But, afterwards, in a fitful sleep while the pawns watched over me in one of their few remaining strongholds, I saw myself dead in more timelines. My beta versions, so to speak, agreed on one point: I could not win my session if she was dead. In my mind, I envisioned converting her - the folly of a dreamer of light! - bringing her to "our" side, the side of creation rather than destruction. I remember this now as it was an indication that I still, _still_ retained the innocence of a Prospit dreamer, that the game wished for me to expand my worldview further.

Another day, another field hospital. And I sang a song that I had written, once for myself, back when I seriously thought I might be "discovered" by a talent scout, rather than spared by an apocalypse:

> It's been a long, long time  
> Since my life was spared  
> It's been a long, long time  
> But I'm still not scared...

I strummed the guitar softly and walked down the central aisle, wanting to take a good look at the pawns I was doing this for. A few heads turned. Most did not.

> If anyone's out there to see what I have done  
> Can somebody tell me what I am to become?  
> Our tiny lives, they fly right by  
> Who were they?  
> And next to them, who the hell am I?

One was dead, staring. I leaned over and closed his eyes; the blood, slowed to a trickle, continued to drip from the stump of a severed leg. Several others were the same. One had nearly been decapitated and struggled to breathe. Most were missing limbs; some had laser or gunshot wounds. Everywhere I looked, I saw the pain. The _smallness_ of the tent pressed upon me, suddenly; I had to get out.

I captchalogued my guitar, told one of the orderlies I was leaving, and left, buttoning the door-flap behind me. As soon as I was outside, I began running. I ran, tears leaving hot-then-cold streaks on my face. I ran past outposts, fortifications, walls, past the motorized platforms that we knew as Rooks and Bishops, past the guns blazing as I ran by. An arrow grazed my hair; I ducked my head, rubbed the streak it had left in my hair, still running. I did not want to fly - I felt that would be cheating.

Hadron. Hadron was who I needed to find. There were more than one of her, time being what it was, and I blindly chose one and ran in that direction. Nothing would stop me. Nothing.

I cared for nothing, at least not until I saw Hadron and wrung the answer out of her - one way or another.


	6. Lies with the Sea

I scaled an earthen barrier and found Hadron sitting on the other side of it, in animated conversation with a Black Pawn. A moment - a heartbeat would have been too long - and I pounced, and Hadron somersaulted out of the way. I screamed - it seemed as if it were not even me doing the screaming, but her mouth didn't move - and ran after her, kicking the Pawn out of the way. I could deal with it later. First I had to fight.

They would later talk of us, of the legendary fight of the Dreamers for the fate of Skaia and the universe. They would sing of the two Dreamers-become-Agents who joined the battle rather than shuffling paperwork, that we were of unique qualities and talents. I came across a god-tier Time outfit on the ground before me, red against the floor as if an omen of the blood that would be shed. It was Hadron's; she had apparently ascended without my help. That explained her skill. It did not explain why she was running -

Oh. A circular depression in the ground, a natural arena. An earlier set of Pawns of color unknown had set this up as a pit trap, but that was a while ago and the bottom now sported the chess-board skin that any soil exposed to the air would receive after a sufficient amount of time. She was inside, beckoning me - taunting me? Possibly something like that.

I hurtled through the air and pulled my sword out and she fired. I spun, avoiding bullets fired out of both hands by bending space. Scratched her face. First blood - and then a bullet slammed into me with force enough to throw me to the opposite wall - wait, no, that wasn't a bullet, that was only a blank. A bruise, then, throbbed on my left leg. I hovered just high enough to favor the injury and circled around her warily.

An opening - I slashed at her with sword unsheathed, she wasn't looking, a moment later she had appeared somewhere else, though not before I had stained her purple-black outfit with blood yet again. In that moment I hated Derse, hated them for perpetrating the war that had killed so many civilians, spilled so much blood. The sight of Hadron's blood was only fair, I told myself.

Her carapace shattered as I struck again, so like the black carapaces of the Dersians that she had joined, she could not use one of her arms at this point. But she was playing with me, with the fact that I was spending two sleepless days on the Battlefield trying to stem the tide. There were as many versions of her as she wanted, and only one of me.

And she came at me again, with her gun raised, three timeclones in one - she had looped time in on itself again in a bid for victory - and I raised my sword and bent space around me so that I was not hit; bullets flew, and one angled crazily through my space-work straight towards me because in my sleep-deprived state I did not account for all the bullets and I raised my sword, bent my universe, to avoid it -

A moment too late. I was wounded.

I was wounded, it was folly, I would die a Just death for the temerity of attempting to turn the tide of the Skaian war - these were the thoughts running through my mind at that moment. I cannot say my life flashed before my eyes, as that had happened several times before. The fear of pain had long since faded over time. The fear of death - well, that's another story; the words came to me then as they did now, unbidden, a near-death experience that had done nothing to me at the time but...

> I fell into the tide  
> It spat me back on the sand  
> I laughed without a clue  
> How lucky I was to land -

I doubled over, bleeding, and the world began to fuzz at the edges, three timeclones became one, the blackness beginning to pull upon me merged with the blackness of a tile of the Battlefield -

It is said that Space is the weak-point of those whose essence is Time, and vice versa.


	7. Chain of Prospit

The next thing I knew of was light. Light, blue light, shot through with white streaks, yellow streaks, red streaks, purple streaks. And then this world shattered, and all I had left was - what? Not Space, not Time, the title of Light is associated with foreknowledge and not electromagnetic radiation, Heart was a misnomer, Doom was inappropriate -

It was Breath. A pulsating breeze. A moment that was also an eternity later I realized that someone was trying to resuscitate me.

I opened my eyes. Hadron's face loomed over me. Her mouth moved and some words came out. "Why did you do this?"

I drew a ragged breath. "Because you are an _idiot_ who thinks that destruction is better than -"

She giggled - the sound of it! - and pointed out the very words that I had once sung to her. "The tide spat you back on the sand. What you thought should've destroyed you gave you another chance. Why? Because -"

"Because you're not the person who should be doing this for me! Do you _want_ Skaia to be destroyed?"

"Not anymore." Her face closed up. "I just thought that this way I'd be able to..."

I sat up, dizzily. "...you weren't actually working for the other side? But the Clouds, I thought you wanted to be an Agent!..."

"I'll -" and she grabbed onto me. There was dried blood on her fingers, her uniform was ripped and torn, and there were strips of cloth tied around the various places where she had pried pieces of her shattered carapace out of her own flesh. "Look, can I explain later? Please? All I can say right now is that I was under duress."

I nod, because, for some reason, I believe her. "Like your crime dramas."

"Let's say, then, that if this were one of your tabletop roleplaying sessions about great wars, I was only a spy, not a turncoat."

A meteor streaked overhead. Then another, and another. Spirograph portals appeared, grabbing the meteors out of thin air and then disappearing. I commented, "So, we have a king and queen to slay."

"I exiled the Queen. Half the job is done." She was already flying, beckoning for me to come after her.

This time, I followed willingly, and with gratitude.


	8. Pumpkin Tide

We finished the session otherwise uneventfully. Both of us fought, spinning space-time in attack after Fraymotif after attack, and - let's just say it was a hard fight, but _we did it_. The game at least had a good difficulty curve in terms of enemies, and, immersed in adrenalin after the fight, we embraced. It was a moment. I treasured it.

I wondered what would become of the game we had just played. I sat down briefly, on an embankment that had no further use after the Armies had been beheaded (so to speak), and briefly scrolled through my wristtop. A few lines later I had a process viewer that pulled in all the copies of the Code I could recognize.

There were millions of them. Billions. I cut it off before my computer memory filled with line after line that I knew to represent instance after instance. Sessions and sessions and sessions. I had not caused the game to self-reproduce. What caused that? A brief spin through the changelog comments on a few of these sessions yielded that the self-reproduction was my idea. Hadron took one look and nodded. "It's your handiwork."

It read like code I had half-forgotten, but I hadn't put it there. I shrugged and put this out of my mind. "Can we see some of these sessions?" Hadron agreed to this and we set off, holding hands, sending both of us hurtling through spacetime-of-paradox-space. No God Tier could jump universes alone, as it required mastery of both time and space, but for both of us... perhaps it was something special about us, but we just looked up the coordinates and intuition - or the part of the Code that had found its way inside our skulls - did the rest.

We landed on a foreign Skaia, to the astonishment of a few stray pawns. It was familiar-yet-not-familiar, a landscape so different but the details so similar that I was struck by emotion briefly. Then I stood and sang my songs, and Hadron and I danced. I'm not sure what drove me, then. I'm not sure it isn't what drives me now. Sure, you could call it love, but that - well, it's not the same thing.

The first performance was an impulse. The second, trying to repeat the feeling. Gradually it occurred to me that my songs were tales of the Ultimate Riddle, the lore of the Frog that was imprinted in my very Code before I was ever born. The allegories were suited perfectly to Skaia; the tales of pumpkins and submarines and clouds only different facets of the same great story.

If I had been religious, it was all an expression of God. Now I was religious, but it was with the story of the Game itself, with the clouds that showed the future and the tentacled beasts who spoke of the past; with the checkerboards of the Battlefield and the irregular islands of a Sea-type planet; with a small stone sculpture of a Frog and the scepter of the King who wished to destroy the frogs.

And so we travel together. We sing, we dance. Perhaps a pawn or a player sees us, either directly or through the Clouds. (It matters not - the Clouds have been tuned so that they show us when we approach. This suits me.) The songs are of Skaia, of the Game, of the Code that underlies it. Of the world the players are to create. Of the children in what sessions we watch.

Perhaps this is a light in the darkness, perhaps I am giving a more direct answer than the game itself is. I try to help. The Game itself seems to enforce that the children go through challenges and must survive on their wits, but I am not bound by Skaia's rules, only the Code.

It is only recently that I had the courage to look again into my session. Hadron and I set our destination, we bent the multiverse to our will, and she concealed us in an air vent near the Derse throne-room. I watched her, brought into the Queen's presence via the prisoner's cage, iron bars that had always existed and were thus impossible to escape by temporal means. She had been crying, dream-makeup staining her face. It was enough of a sight that I, too, touched my cheeks and found that they were wet.

But there was one thing left for me to do, still.


	9. The Deeper You Go

It was through my travels, through the Multiverse we will create, that I happened upon a terrible sight. A universe, being bodily eaten - perhaps not in the literal sense, but certainly it was obvious from my vantage-point - by a demon. Hadron crept up, past the edge of the Furthest Ring of the session we were inside, and watched intently. He was eating universes, and there were not enough left for him to eat for eternity. That was when I thought of a plan.

Sburb creates universes. It creates lots of them. Every universe that Sburb creates has multiple planets, each of which can support an Sburb session. A bit of quick work and the job was done already. Simple enough to deploy, and - okay, so universes were being eaten by a demon, but so what? I had created more, infinitely more, and the demon could certainly not eat them all. Hadron looked at me strangely as I proposed this and asked if I had forgotten about the universes' inhabitants.

True, half the multiverse was populated by races that called themselves human, and by and large they were indeed human beings like I was. And true, the ones that weren't had strange customs and moralities and sometimes broke the game instead of playing it. A simple adjustment to the code, a test for sentience, fixed this marvelously.

It was called the Frog Temple.

And thus it came to me, finally, that I had written my own destiny but that destiny had been written on me. But I had the will, and I had the ability to change the multiverse. The questions were difficult and the Frog lay at the end of a convoluted path of clonings; but the answer did exist, would always exist, and was achievable. So would life, and so would the multiverse-of-multiverses.

This is, ultimately, what we fight for. We create universes to hold him off, to ensure that sentient life remains in our multiverse. We are the one shining star in the darkness, burning bright to stay the hand of the unspeakable horrors beyond, to ensure that life remains always.

One day, perhaps we too will fall to his ravenous appetite - but until then, we must fight, for life, for universes. We will seed species, hardy species, far and wide - in every universe we create. They will have intelligence and strength. The best Players will work for us, figuring out how to make the game better for its purpose and more fun for the players. These two aims can coexist, I trust they will figure out how.

One day, one session's children will end the demon, I know this well. As the former agent of Prospit, I congratulate them for their decisive action in ending the carnage. As the programmer of SBurb, I commend them for achieving a goal I could only clear the pathway to. As a human from the planet Earth, which is now roamed by men and women in black and white carapaces, I wish for them to become the very best that they can be.

\-- Mobius


End file.
